Wandering Around Looking Up Cameron Hummels' Notes on Science and Travel

Eclipse a Success. Censorship in Shanghai.

Updating this blog has become problematic from China. Somehow my domain got on the censorship list by the Chinese authorities, such that I cannot access it from here in China. (It’s pretty amazing that a government can justify blocking access for their citizens to huge chunks of the internet—Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, any article mentioning Tibet, Falun Gong, etc.) My good friend Jeff Oishi has been kind enough to update the blog for me while I’m in China with emails that I send to him. Thanks, Jeff!

I find myself in Shanghai at 9AM about to explore the city. Erika and I have had a wild last couple of days since I last posted. At our location of Tianhuangping, a mountain observatory and hotel northwest of Hangzhou, we succeeded in seeing the solar eclipse! This is some feat considering that a large number of eclipse-goers were clouded in at many other observing sites. It was raining heavily in Shanghai, it was cloudy in Hangzhou, and even a mountain a few miles from our viewing location (that we had considered for observing the eclipse) was clouded out. Evidently there was a line of clouds right down the center line of where the total solar eclipse could be seen, and we got extremely lucky to view it.

Tianhuangping is a mountain resort and observatory, hosting a hotel as well as the new location of the Shanghai observatory (the old one is too close to the pollution of Shanghai). It is about 1000 meters above sea level in a nice little mountain/hill chain, distant from any cities with light pollution or real pollution. We anticipated a few thousand people visiting the remote location, from domestic tourist groups to international tourist groups because of the publicity it had received from our very own Jay Pasachoff over the previous year or two as the ‘best’ viewing location for this eclipse. And right he was. There was a large reservoir near the hotel that provided a beautiful backdrop to the main event that was to occur in the sky. The tourists would be herded around the reservoir in their respective groups, each delimited by tape with security and police keeping a watchful eye.

All of the real astronomical research being done by the scientists located on the roof of the hotel, but there was little room for our low-tech setup of a telescope. Instead, we had scouted out a location with the most picturesque landscape below where the eclipse would occur. The backdrop were these stunning untouched mountains lush with acres upon acres of bamboo. We were joined by another astrophotographer and graduate student, Michael.

The morning started at 5AM on Wednesday the 22nd, when Erika and I got up, had breakfast and headed out to beat the crowds to our telescope setup spot. We weren’t strictly supposed to be in our location, as it was up a hill overlooking the reservoir next to the power station for the whole complex. We tried to look official so that we wouldn’t be forcibly removed by the police or overwhelmed by tourists trying to hone in on our location. Because we arrived early, we got set up quickly and then Erika sat like a guard dog on the path up to our location, blocking any potential tourists with a steely gaze and hands on her hips. Several groups of tourists tried to come up to our location (Chinese, Scandinavian and German), but Erika was very effective at blocking them and convincing them that we were carrying out official business on the hillside. It worked most effectively when the police came to take us down. Well done, E!

Our setup was anything but official-looking. I had intentionally brought low-weight, low-tech and low-cost instruments for observation, as I intend to leave the equipment here in Asia, rather than carting it the rest of our way home. I brought a Galileoscope, a $15 2-inch refracting telescope, a couple of $15 tripods, and a solar filter for the telescope. Instead of a nice SLR camera like everyone else seemed to be carrying, I had my Canon wide-field, point and shoot SD880 ELF. I set up the telescope on a tripod with the solar filter and an eyepiece, then arranged the camera on its own tripod to peer in the eyepiece of the telescope in the way a person would with their eye. It worked pretty well after some fidgeting, but in the end, it wasn’t good enough to get any great photographs through the telescope. The most entertaining part about the telescope is that it has a big sticker on the side with a graphic warning against pointing the telescope at the Sun! Of course, we were using a solar filter to observe the Sun, so it was OK, but it was funny nonetheless.

Solar eclipses occur when there is an alignment between the Sun, the Moon and the Earth, such that the Moon (which is coincindentally a similar angular size in the Sky as the Sun) blocks all of the light from the Sun for a certain location on the Earth. They last anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes, and they tend to occur *somewhere* on the Earth every year and a half. This particular eclipse was the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century, lasting over 6 minutes in some locations (only 5:39 in ours). The shadow of the Moon passed in a 100-mile swath from Northern India through Asia to Southern China and then out into the Western Pacific.

At 8:20AM, first contact occurred, where the Moon slowly started to eat the Sun. This was not obvious as there was no appreciable decrease in ambient light. You needed to look through a solar filter in order to see the shape of the solar disk—no longer was it a circle, but now it had a little bite taken out of the side. The weather was relatively hazy and cloudy during this period. You could see the Sun relatively well, but there were periods when thick clouds passed in front of it and blocked it out. Everyone was very nervous that we weren’t going to see it, given the clouds, and the weather forecast for thunderstorms, but we were still hopeful. After all, many people (like us) had traveled thousands of miles to witness this event.

Over the next 70 minutes, this bite in the Sun got gradually bigger and bigger, as the Moon overtook the Sun in the sky. In the last 5 minutes before second contact (the beginning of totality), things changed dramatically. The light took on an eery color and brightness that I had never witnessed before; it was dark like twilight but the Sun was still overhead making it look very surreal. I was trying to get my equipment trained on the Sun so that I could get some more pictures, but I was to some degree stupefied by the situation and found it difficult to fiddle with telescope equipment.

At exactly 9:33:01AM, the Moon covered the Sun and everything got rapidly and extremely dark. The five thousand people around the reservoir went crazy, shouting and gasping. Erika shouted ‘this is outrageous!’, and I had to agree. When the Moon covers the Sun during an eclipse, it blocks out all of the light from the main disk of the Sun; however, light from the corona (Latin for crown), the thin, superhot region around the Sun still illuminates the scene. The corona is one millionth the brightness of the normal Sun (about the brightness of a full Moon). The sky is as dark as a night lit by only the Moon, but instead of looking up to see the Moon in the sky, you see this strangely-shaped donut, the corona around the blotted-out Sun. The cicadas that had been whining previously took up a fever pitch, probably what they do at dusk, and it made the situation even more surreal. Looking along the horizon in any direction, you could see reddish light, coming from the regions not in the direct shadow of the Moon, where the white light is scattered down to an ember-red by all of the air on the way to our eyes.

Erika shouted to look at the zenith and I could see a bright point of light, Venus, directly overhead. Of course, Venus had been there all morning long, but it had been virtually invisible since the light from the Sun up until then had been too bright. Astounding! I struggled to shoot a few pictures through the telescope and then of the wide field of the scene, but I couldn’t focus on anything but enjoying the spectacle of it all. Erika and I looked through the telescope (now with the solar filter taken off) to see the corona close-up. It was amazing to see the streamers coming off the disk of the Sun, representing the hot plasma caught in the strong magnetic field lines of the Sun.

After 5 minutes and 38 seconds, the Sun arose from the Moon’s shadow at third contact. As it arose, there was a beautiful diamond-ring image that I was unable to capture, but that Jay’s group got a good photo of. All of the partial phases of the eclipse that we had seen leading up to totality happened in reverse order, but no one was too concerned with them. We had all witnessed something breathtaking, and we were excited to talk about it, not to see the shadow recede slowly from the disk. After 30 minutes or so, we packed up our equipment and wandered back to the hotel, discussing all that we had just witnessed.

In the end, we got lucky. For much of China, the eclipse was nothing more than a brief darkness in a cloudy sky, but for us, it was a once-in-a-lifetime surreal experience. I got a few pictures, but I couldn’t capture the glory of it all. For that, you’ll have to travel to see an eclipse. Be aware that there will be a total solar eclipse over North America in 2017, visible from Oregon to Kentucky, to the East coast, so mark your calendars. It is not something you will want to miss.

For images of the eclipse from other locations, check out space.com or skyandtelescope.com or your favorite popular science media outlet. Maybe you’ll see one from Jay Pasachoff’s group.